A federal appeals court has set September 23 the date for a hearing in the i4i …

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An appeals court in Washington said this week it will hear arguments on September 23 in regard to Microsoft's request to delay an earlier order that imposed a permanent injunction on selling Word in the US as of October 10, 2009. Microsoft winning a quick hearing is good news for the company, but the Canadian-based i4i, the company that owns the patent that Microsoft has been found to be infringing, isn't worried.

We firmly believe that the US District Court made the right decision on the merits of the case," said i4i chairman Loudon Owen. "We are confident that we will prevail on the appeal by Defendant Microsoft. This is a vital case for inventors and entrepreneurial companies who, like i4i, are damaged by the willful infringement of their patents by competitors; particularly competitors as large and powerful as Microsoft. The expedited schedule of the Court of Appeals is appreciated and welcomed by i4i."

Earlier this week, Microsoft filed an emergency motion with the US District Court for Eastern Texas in a desperate attempt to block a ruling that could force it to stop selling its flagship Office product. If upheld, the injunction wouldn't stop existing users from using Word, but it could prevent Redmond from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007, and would require the company to significantly tweak Word 2010, which is slated for the first half of next year.

Last week, a federal court in eastern Texas issued an injunction that gave Microsoft 60 days to stop shipping any recent version of Word, based on a patent that was found to cover the XML formatting used by the software. The ruling, which followed one from May 2009 where Microsoft was found to be infringing one of the patents and asked to pay up $200 million, was in favor of i4i. Word 2003 and Word 2007 were both found to be infringing on i4i's patent by using extensible markup language (XML) for encoding and customizing XML in a specific way (US Patent No. 5,787,449). Microsoft still feels that i4i's patents are invalid.